Grace
by f3tid
Summary: His focus fell elsewhere as he allowed her lips to brush his, eyes clamping closed as he inhaled the young woman's aroma and relished in the very texture of her flesh.
1. Fragility

**A/N: **You could call this a "first time" story. It'll definitely be a series (long or short, I haven't decided), and the rating is definitely subject to change. That said, please enjoy!

**Disclaimer:** I don't intend to generate a profit from the characters or storylines I've used in the following work of fiction. Anything reminiscent of the Star Trek lore or reality is purely coincidental and does not, by any means, belong to me.

* * *

**Grace**

Translucent rivulets dribbled along gentle valleys of flesh as the mother stream mounted on the wall ceased its resilient cascade. The minute rills spanned the length of the woman's frame, wet veins of russet ornamenting every curvature of her physiognomy and spilling hazardously from her fingertips, her toes, the coppice of eyelashes grazing the surface of her cheeks as she clamped her eyes shut against the water. She drew her fingers across her face before tugging a towel free of the shower's topmost beam and streamed it parallel to her shoulders. The creature expelled a soft breath, the specter of her voice tainting the air as it oozed from her throat. Her fingers curled. The towel caressed her bare skin and contended with her shoulder blades as it engulfed her from behind, masking her svelteness in a plush cape of linen.

With one indelicate hand, she coaxed open the opaque pane of glass adjacent her and plunged a foot into the thick humidity pervading the room. She pinched the unremarkable fabric between her thumb and forefinger and meekly slid the shower door back in place with her subdominant hand. A pleasantly suffocated breath welled in her lungs and expanded her chest, the flats of her toes caressing the knit grasses of the Spartan floor mat unfurled atop the tile as she languorously traipsed before the bathroom sink. She shed the towel and painted the clouded mirror's face with a broad sweep of her hand bunched up within its folds. She scoured a drawer with the pads of her fingers alone and procured a brush, running it succinctly through her matted ochre tendrils and replacing it moments later.

Balanced effervescently on the balls of her feet, she pivoted about and approached the door handle with eager hands. Her towel snaked its way up lofty legs, embraced her hips with the fragility of an open palm, wandered across the slender rungs of her ribcage and ensnared her chest in an affixed embrace. She fled the bathroom on her toes, tawny strands weighted by wetness littering her shoulders, back and breast, in search of him.

The atmosphere in the foyer was not unlike that in the bathroom. The air was warm and tinged with the vaguely saccharine pungency of ignited candlewicks and the scalded petals of foreign flora. Darkness collided vibrantly with the iridescent eddies of firelight suspended on the ceiling and walls cast by roundels of clay encrusted candles. It was quiet and the ambiance was dense with soothing odor and heat, but something soared effortlessly, coalescent with candle fumes and the soundless song of tranquility. A simper transmuted the woman's naked lips as she stood idly beneath the stucco arc bridging the master bedroom and common area, watching him. In the vestibule's center, he was rooted by the haunches to the floor in a state of primal serenity. His eyes were closed listlessly and his mouth was fixated into the prim, untailored line as was habitual, evanescent breath percolated by splendid silence.

"Nyota," he stirred temperedly, although he made no effort to extensively jilt his meditation.

She leapt, eyes broadening at the suddenness and entirety of his awareness. The fleshy sinews of her neck contracted about the swallow disrupting its flawless composition. "Oh! I wasn't sure whether it was okay to say anything. I didn't mean to disrupt you, I'm sorry."

He did not address her with paltry lexis or the penetratingly dark depths of his eyes, but she was sated by the innate knowledge that his attention was with her.

"Thank you, though," she spoke complacently, "for letting me use your shower."

"Gratitude is an unnecessary sentiment, regarding the matter. Should you require the utilization of certain facilities to satisfy your needs, it is most efficient to make use of those nearest in proximity. You are permitted to use anything that best suits your physiognomic functions, free of expiratory limitation."

The woman snuffed an ingratiated chortle and ventured an exploratory few steps into the sanctity of the foyer. "I appreciate that."

The candlelight's diaphanous shimmer abruptly diminished, she found, as the decumbent male frame before her extended, expanded, and his eyes eschewed the spirituous draft of the room to life. He watched her beneath the daunt of half-hooded eyelids, his inscrutable irises cajoling her nearer and threatening to consume her with only the depth of their gaze. The cadet's gait stalled and she planted her heels in the polished floorboards upon which she stood. Their figures were linked only by a mutual glimpse, shared across meters of vacant space.

"Acknowledged," he said.

Had she stolen relief from the havoc of his sophist physique – the pensive intricacy in the way he deciphered her with a glance and the way she saw those impossibly swift and complicated thoughts flit across his eyes in methodic succession – she'd have missed the indulgent sweep of his sight across her frame. His immutable expression did not falter, evermore imperceptible. Her hands found the linen lip of the towel encompassing her chest in a bout of self-consciousness. An acutely human quality, he noted.

Her eyes turned upon the window pane behind the executive officer, the cityscape spread beyond it undetailed and marred by the blackness of night. She sighed and glanced quietly to her fingers. "Spock, I gotta go. It's getting late and if I don't make curfew again, my dorm advisor's gonna give me hell."

He nodded curtly. "I encourage that you abide dormitory regulations."

"Then I'll go change and let you get back to your meditation," she drawled lethargically as she stole a number of paces across the foyer. She subsidized hiatus and stood just before him, her toes curling against the laminated wood below and elevating her inch by inviting inch. A smirk teeming with intent unwound on the canvas of her lips. "Commander."

Spock pursed his brow demurely, a dour angle tilting his head and straining the capable sinews of his neck. "You adamantly requested that we refer to each other by given name in private, Nyota."

She chuckled, lurching forward as a means of goading him into her awaiting kiss. "I know, Spock, I'm poking fun."

His focus fell elsewhere as he allowed her lips to brush his, eyes clamping closed as he inhaled the young woman's aroma and relished in the very texture of her flesh. The man remained immobile and briefly unresponsive as the emotions saturating the surface of the alluring creature's skin transferred unto him. Jarred and temporarily compromised as he sought with a militant restraint to suppress and comprehend the passionate insights coursing through the human's dermal receptors. She had interpreted his cognitive aside to be hesitation, and he felt her festering sentiments cool. She retracted from the embrace and met his eyes with uncertainty.

Apprehensively, he nudged the bridge of her nose with the terse precipice of his brow, spine bowed as he approached her stature. "I am unfamiliar with the phrase," he mummered softly.

Her grin precipitated solace for them both, and she eliminated what pockets of air separated their frames. Uhura molded a hand to the inline of the lankier man's jaw, her fingertips impressing his pallid skin. His hands migrated to the slender canyon betwixt her hips and breast and interlaced at her lower waist. She grew conscious of her relative nudity as he held her aberrantly close. She pondered, with finality, the inhuman warmth radiating from the man in her arms and an akin fire kindled in the flesh of his immense and capable hands. Recalling the indecipherable survey he'd devoted to her figure and how diminutive she felt when swathed between his hands, the woman found herself vulnerable. The focal fixture in an oeuvre of maturing affinity, she had never been so aware of her weakness. She had never felt so very, very human.


	2. Anyone but You

**A/N:** I'd like to extend a genuine thank you to all those who reviewed and critiqued my first chapter. All of your input is wildly invaluable, and I truly appreciate it all. Thanks very much. I tried to appeal to my own love of language with this chapter, but revised it numerous times in an effort to make it more accessible to others, as well. I hope that came across without demeaning the work itself, or all of you.

**Disclaimer:** I don't intend to generate a profit from the characters or storylines I've used in the following work of fiction. Anything reminiscent of the Star Trek lore or reality is purely coincidental and does not, by any means, belong to me.

* * *

Forty-three minutes had elapsed before Uhura hastened over her dorm room's threshold and into the slough of humid air and the muffled sound of an exacerbated showerhead. She glanced about the room, eyes catching on the solitary lamplight left on the nightstand between Gaila's bed and hers. Sighing, the woman dropped her satchel to the floor and lobbed her shoes beneath her mattress as she forayed ever further into the entrails of the largely unlit chamber.

"Damn, Uhura," resounded a coarse and distinctly male voice from the interminable darkness. A shorthanded command later, the lights were activated and revealed a half-nude man strewn casually across the neighboring bed. "I didn't peg you for the kind to skirt curfew."

The cadet seethed through grated teeth, but collapsed unto her bed instead of openly confronting the bronze haired nuisance. "Of _course _you're here. How'd you get her to take you back this time?"

"Honestly?" He loosed a broken chuckle from the depths of his chest and rolled onto his side to face the woman prone across from him. Uhura furrowed her brows and glared pointedly at the ceiling. "I just showed up."

The infamously ambitious boy was met with aggravated silence. Still, his grin persisted.

"So, where were you?"

The woman's breath hitched quietly in her throat. Her eyes closed and she chased the memories of the commander's lips pursed measuredly against her own, the feverish smolder of his skin and the sensation of his fingers tautening against her back. She threaded the digits on one hand through her dampened curls and imagined how the sensation might have differed, had it been Spock's hand instead.

"Uhura," He roused her from her wistful thoughts.

She smiled despite herself. "I don't really see how that's any of your business, Jim."

He cupped his chin in the callous palm of one hand, arm protracted on a disheveled pillow. His naked chest shuddered in accordance with his own incredulous laughter and bemused creases appeared at the corners of his eyes and mouth. The merriment perished after a few prolonged instants and an errant rove of his eyes over the xenolinguist's physique. The wary glare she belted at him went either unnoticed or ignored. She hadn't expected more.

"Oh, come _on_. We're friends," he exclaimed. His vertebrae aligned slightly as he relegated his weight unto his hips and pitched forward. "How many sleepovers have we had since you've known me?"

She gave a vitriolic cinch of the flesh about her eyes. "None."

Jim spliced the air with a wayward index finger. "That you know about."

"That's discomforting."

"Well, what's his name?"

The woman held her silence with an imperceptible desperation, although she was tempted to sing Spock's name like a hymn. If only to savor the taste of ownership on her tongue, she wanted to relay to man reclined across from her the truest extent of the emotions she harbored for her commanding officer. She wanted to struggle through her sentences, to rack her vocabulary for the most lurid words she knew – in any dialect – to describe the surface of his inner hand slaking across her skin, the reticent way he'd provoke her kiss. She wanted more than anything, she thought, for her own masterful comprehension of language to fail her in every facet, in only the way Spock could incite. Desperately, she wanted to tell Cadet Kirk just how frightened she was to be incomparably and irretrievably in love.

"Most people can't pronounce it," she told him instead.

Kirk bore his teeth in a boyish leer. "I'll just have to make one up, then."

Uhura indulged an amused smirk and lolled about to face him. "We've had this conversation before."

"And I _still_ don't know your first name," he groused.

She searched his face fleetingly for the answers that could never seem to surface in herself. His flesh was coated in a film of perspiration, the origins of which she had no interest in pursuing, and his cheeks were strained by the looming and consistent presence of a grin. Mirth streaked the skin just beneath his eyes as he watched her in retaliation, and it was almost refreshing how easily she could decipher the emotions contorting his features and stewing in his head. A puckish satisfaction was laying there, not haunted by needless obstruction or control. Jim Kirk was by no means Commander Spock, and for that, she was at once gracious and cruelly disappointed.

"How long have you been together?" she watched him say.

"It'll be a year in September," she expounded quietly, although pride disfigured her voice into another entity entirely.

He expelled a disgruntled breath, though a smile still stained his face. "Wha – a _Terran_ year?"

"I thought that was implied, yeah."

"And you're _still_ not spending the night?" he sputtered, "What, is he a Deltan or something?"

She shook her head, snickering. "No, he hasn't taken a vow of celibacy."

"Does his species reproduce asexually, then? That's the only reason I can think anyone wouldn't wanna –"

"Want to _what_?" Uhura nearly spat.

The lavatory door slid open, then, with a machinated wheeze. Billows of ashen water vapor spilled into the room and aggravated the already insufferable humidity therein. A green leg forked the dispersing fog and a woman traipsed into the room with unparalleled ease. Clad in a robe, she regarded the woman across the room with a familiar glance though she geared a cautionary frown in Kirk's direction. She fell gracefully to the foot of her bed and buried her fingers in the mess of scarlet tendrils falling triflingly into her face.

"_What_ about asexual reproduction?" she posed affably to a room suddenly devoid of conversation. "Hey, Uhura."

She nodded her salutation. "Kirk was just getting way too involved in my personal life, that's all."

"You're talking about the sex thing?"

"_Gaila!_"

"What?" she countered, "You've been dating forever. Emotionless android or not, you can't just keep going on this way when you obviously want something more. There's taking things slow, and there's dead on arrival, Nee."

Uhura kneaded her fingers in the quilted mounds of her bedspread and contemplated the small woman with a frown. She couldn't have expected her to understand the complexities of her relationship with the commander. It was an alien perpetuity, having to keep their bond secret. The Orion girl would never concern herself with quiet affection, nor would she ever know the comfort in a clandestine hand finding her own beneath a tabletop. Gaila would never have the privilege of getting close enough to a man to decrypt every diluted gleam that spattered his eyes. She would never lose hours to listless conversation the way she and Spock had, converging on colossal topics and allowing words to die in the starless embers of nothing. Pauses with him had never been anything, if not all the more enthralling.

"Okay, hang on," Kirk said, "Gaila knows who the guy is? Why can't I know who the guy is? And 'Nee'? Who's Nee?"

"_Gaila_ knows who the guy is because she's _supposed _to be here, unlike some people I know," the Orion rejoined sharply, "And don't worry about Nee, she can handle herself."

The boy's crystalline eyes incinerated as he was shooed from the bed's surface and unto his feet. He gathered his Starfleet issue slacks blindly as he addressed Uhura with a wry smile. "You're Nee? That's your name?"

Uhura shook her head as Kirk baltered from foot to foot, all the while being herded from the room by an increasingly irate Gaila. "No dice, Cadet."

"Get out already!" the petite creature shouted, "I told you you're not allowed to stay here!"

"I'll figure it out, y'know. There's no way I won't."

Jim Kirk disappeared behind the door's chrome veneer, his lips still tailored in that unattainably amicable bow and his eyes still glimmering in all the ways a Vulcan's never could.

* * *

**Shameless Self-Promotion:** Do you have a penchant for reading and writing? Are you simply interested in being a part of the Star Trek lore? That's grand! A Star Trek roleplay is only in its nascence, and in desperate need of characters. Please explore Link City on my profile page for more information. Many thanks!


	3. Codetta

**A/N:** I contemplated a lot of ideas before getting to work on this chapter. In the end, I found the final product everything it needed to be, at this point in the story. I really think it offers some insight on who the true narrator of this story is, if that's at all unclear. Anyway, feedback is much appreciated, as always. I invite you to check out the links on my profile page, in any case, if you enjoy Star Trek, my writing, or just good old fashioned artistic labor. Enjoy!

**Disclaimer: ** I don't intend to generate a profit from the characters or storylines I've used in the following work of fiction. Anything reminiscent of the Star Trek lore or reality is purely coincidental and does not, by any means, belong to me.

* * *

Perhaps he had too frequently allowed himself to be engulfed by his work. Such was an efficacious vice – a privilege, even, to those with half-hooded eyes unburdened by stars. The conscientious fingers constricting his veins had, at first, directed him as far from the young Terran with the broad smile as physically attainable. Those same cold fingernails that admonished his every lingering glimpse with a haughty dig had been dragged away by the swell of her laughter, replaced with the salty froth of the sunrise that she treasured so dearly. The pleasant monotony of the human heartbeat had danced him to sleep each night since her thumb had brushed his in the throes of an inefficient PADD transference and an impassioned debate regarding the status of a fellow cadet's grade.

Instead of lending his assistance at the prospect of difficulty, he elected to observe. He watched, enraptured, as the young woman tapered her brow and learned the science of the object balanced between two palms with the inner flesh of her hands. The tawny flecks freckling her irises reflected profound intellect, that of a mind unconfined by slow things like partisan and predilection. She beheld the instrument with such proud admiration, tasting its machinations with the pads of her fingertips and appraising its worth in music, rather than weight or credits. He contemplated sumptuously whether she looked the same way at him as she did a Vulcan lyre.

Spock nudged his cheek against the young woman's shoulder, still contented with the tempo of his own silence. She eased minutely into his chest with a moderately exasperated breath. He fixed his eyes to her expression, and was fascinated by the faultless grin that augmented her lips. A repellant tune sang from an ignorantly plucked string and bathed the foyer in its ugly timbre. Nyota's lids fell with incomparable grace, eyelashes sweeping the summit of her cheeks.

"This doesn't seem fair," she murmured gently, although the words seemed to petrify in her chest before being granted to the air.

The commander shifted to perch his chin atop the naked knoll of muscle spanning the entirety of her upper shoulder, eyes reeled down at the jagged drone of the harp in her hands. She met his eyes and laughed as he tilted a thick black brow.

"I certainly hope you're entertained watching me flounder with this damn thing," She deflected a nonexistent jape. "I've never even seen one outside of your apartment."

"I am intrigued," Spock replied somberly as he eclipsed her hand with one of his own.

"Is that your way of telling me it sounds awful?" she laughed again, devoid this time of the same ardor that drew the weak sun's efflorescence through the window fixtures and onto her skin.

He caressed her narrow digits with his and rotated them so as to excavate the creases in the bed of her hand with an unobstructed stare. The surplus flesh between his brows bunched as he considered the subtle trench between two parallel tendons stretched across length of her forearm. He explored the topography of her wrist with the underside of his thumb and patiently embraced the pulse that lay buried somewhere beneath the muscle. Nyota rested the base of the instrument atop her thighs as her focus found Spock's massive hand.

"Your hands," he said with the inquisitive tone texture of a child, though his tenor delivered his words like coffee grounds under a hungry blade, "are very small."

"Yes, they are." She quietly said.

With her hand under the pall of Spock's, they approached the manifold lyre strings. They waited – one dispassionate and the other anticipatory – for the sound of composed and practiced melody. When it occurred, their eyes did not meet. Another. And a third. Nyota's gleeful but reasonably silent grin was palpable. Her skin bled the crux of human happiness into Spock's palm. He did not smile, but together they played.


	4. Upendo ana Sauti

**A/N:** My sincerest apologies for the delay. _Upendo _is the longest chapter thus far, and I'm quite proud of the final product. Indulge and enjoy. As always, any and all feedback is greatly appreciated.

**Disclaimer: **I don't intend to generate a profit from the characters or storylines I've used in the following work of fiction. Anything reminiscent of the Star Trek lore or reality is purely coincidental and does not, by any means, belong to me.

* * *

The day fell in with the tide as a teeming brook of students emptied the lecture hall in languid swells. The diffident waltz of dust particles in the shuttered sunlight pouring through the windowpanes was the only remnant of the ravenous intellect that had once inhabited the room. Questions, stewing on the tonguetips of a multitude of fervent cadets, lilted vigorously on the draft meandering about via the gap betwixt a solitary window's sill and its glass. The intricacies of language, the magnificent vicissitudes of learning, blanketed the room in a translucent sheen. Communal intelligence was the indistinguishable scent dancing on the breeze. Books wept the aroma from the aged edges of their pages in all the ways unattainable by the efflorescent guise of a PADD screen.

Summer's splendid light accommodated the frame of the woman in the window. It kissed the bronze expanse of skin left bare by the uniform ornamenting her figure, bronze comingled with all the resplendence of gold. Her focus belonged to the contents of the novel fixed in her fingers, gentle prow narrowed in thought and her lips pursed slightly. The auburn depths of her eyes were obscured by the drapery of her lashes, dense and lofty. She stood with one foot roosted upon a stair, the other at a ceaseless stalemate of motion and pause atop another.

He studied her quietly from the foot of the stairs, idle from the moment the hall had been cleared and they were granted the intimacy of its aftermath. He counted the number of individual strands of hair made distinct by the spray of the sunlight through them, theorized the thoughts that manipulated the furrow of her brows. In the entire spectrum of humanity, she had been the only enigma. Somewhere, beneath the procedural Vulcan suppression, he was puzzled.

The door slaked open and both the commander and his assistant found the threshold with anticipatory eyes.

He recollected easily the visage of his only Orion pupil in the doorway and hinged a brow as she waded into the room with a characteristic lack of formality. She approached him and he denoted the odd nonverbal exchange she shared with Uhura before addressing him.

"Cadet Lanateias," he saluted.

"Commander Spock," she parlayed with a small smile, "Are you busy right now?"

He replied promptly, "I have been summoned for an audience with my fellow instructors and must be present in 6.43 minutes."

"Well, do you have a moment to discuss my grade?" she implored, her smile fading.

The gleaming speckles of sunlight in his eyes were obscured briefly by the collapse of his brow. "Stipulate, Cadet."

"It's just that," the cadet paused, evidently struggling to ascertain her thoughts, "During yesterday's advanced combat simulation exam, you told me that I'd only made a minor mistake in not monitoring the output of the warp core emissions."

She looked at him as though in search of confirmation. He did not acknowledge it.

"But when I looked at the grades you published, I got a 64.5%."

"That is correct," he corroborated.

"I got marked down that much for a minor issue?" the woman exclaimed as she retreated a step from her instructor, "Sir, forgive the insubordination, but it's the final day of instruction for the semester, and I've given way too much to this course to pass with anything less than a B. You said I had a comprehensive grasp of bridge systems, didn't you?"

"While negligence toward the levels of warp core emissions is a commonplace error that a myriad of engineers make, Cadet, the repercussions of such mistakes are mortal for those posted below deck. Should the radiation reach a summit – which, during your examination, it did – the lives of those immediately surrounding the core would be eradicated. For your inaction to negate the matter, you were evaluated. Your aptitudes in other aspects of the exam remain undisputed, however."

The discordant rhythm of shoe soles tapping swiftly against the sleek surface of the floor tiles was evident as Uhura strayed from her perch before the gargantuan window pane at the room's flank. She halted just beside the commander, the book poised upon the upturned flats of her hands and her fixation finding his profile indefinitely. He watched impassively from his periphery as she clamped her lower lip between her teeth.

"It's difficult to appreciate my aptitudes, sir, when they apparently count for nothing as far as my final grade's concerned." She reproached, a knot developing between her eyebrows as a temper undulated, just beneath the surface of her emerald skin.

"It is not conducive to the learning process to reward your mistakes, Cadet Lanateias."

"So you won't change it?"

"I will not."

"But it's the end of the year, Commander! There's gotta be –"

"_Commander_," the lamprophony of the Vulcan tongue conjured Spock's attention. He swiveled his head to grace the emotionally manipulated expression of his assistant, a brow quirked and expectancy etched across his eyes. "_You have five minutes to get to the conference hall. I can talk with her._"

He contemplated the severity of the gaze she beheld him with. He mirrored her inflection as he retorted pointedly in his native language. "_I am obstinate in my decision._"

The nod that the young woman replied with diminished in poignancy as she brushed her fingers as nonchalantly as possible. She bypassed his imposing figure, her hand streaking across the soft surface of his own, and she plucked a PADD from the surface of the podium erected in the room's epicenter. His skin festered with the gravity of Uhura's understanding and he returned her nod as she slid the tablet between his fingers. The natal grin that spread across her lips was affectionate in nature, he'd come to recognize.

"_I know the meeting does not have a set time frame, but I hope you will be back soon._"

Spock nodded and relieved her of the device.

"_I look forward to dinner tonight._"

"_I anticipate a mutually pleasant experience_," He experimented innately with the words dawdling on his lips before he addressed Uhura again, traipsing for the door. "It is crucial that I take my leave, Cadet Uhura. Cadet Lanateias."

The woman waded into the sunlight a step further and Spock's attention affixed to the distinct descent of her voice as she adopted another, more intimate phonetic key. "_Kurudi kwangu_."

He replied in his own faultless mimic of the language of her people, his perpetually unfeeling expression disavowing him of the affection that so bled from the word, "_Daima_."

The Vulcan's exit was sealed with the finality of the lecture hall's door kissing its frame with a shrill mechanical swish. Uhura's gaze lingered in the doorway until the translucent specter of the commander's presence dispersed. The simper agitating her cheeks broadened as she absorbed the weight of his farewell. "_Return to me_," was the demand she had made and "_Always,_" had been his retort. She dragged the flat of a fingertip across her lower lip, daring it to mirror the sensation of Spock's kiss. Gaila's voice decimated whatever silence slumbered, remiss, between the cascading shreds of dust in the rays of light magnified by the gracious window panes.

"What the _hell_ was that?" the smaller creature delved through grated teeth.

Uhura pasquinaded a cold face wrought with ignorance. "What?"

"_That_! With Professor Hardass, just now!" the Orion jabbed. "You guys have a secret code? When did that happen?"

She chuckled in sincerity and wandered to the bookshelves situated in the nook between Spock's desk and hers. "Vulcan is hardly a coded language."

"Well, obviously. I picked up _something_ from that bullshit Intro to Vulcan Language and Culture class, but _what_ about that bit at the end?"

"Swahili?"

"You taught him Swahili?" the young engineer shouted, a licentious smirk contorting the topography of her face.

"I don't know if you'd call it teaching, per se. He was conversational in under a week, and a lot of that was because of his work ethic. Wait, _what_ exactly do you think we do when we're alone together…?"

"Clearly not sex, so I guess you have to do something else to pass the time. Some couples go on dates; I guess your thing is to study alien languages together." The girl seemed briefly overwhelmed and subsequently stole a few pedantic moments to compose herself aloud. "Speaking of, you were out pretty late last night. Did you and Commander Eyebrows get a bit too cozy at his place?"

The ceiling appealed ineffably more to the xenolinguistics major's eye than the hungry stare of her roommate and friend. "I fell asleep there; it isn't a big deal."

"And what'll you do now?"

The cadet's brow furrowed and she trawled the expanse of Gaila's face for the answer to questions not yet posed. "What do you mean?"

"For summer! Are you gonna fly home or stick around here with the Vulcan?"

Uhura recollected the lethargy of dawn as she had risen from a bed that was not her own. She had imbibed her surroundings encumbered with sleep and uncertain in the shadow of a dormant sun. A column of sentry windows were sealed with rows of blinds drawn and the puce bedclothes that pooled about her physique exuded the scent of an absent body. She had been alone in his bedroom that morning, still garbed with the civilian clothes she had arrived in, but remnants of the commander surrounded her. The phantom warmth left by his touch occupied the empty bedside, her shoulders, her lips. An organized conglomerate of boots and dress shoes lined the wall opposite her, wedged between a crowded bookshelf and a tantric foreign meditation space. The bathroom door was closed and the reverberation of water droplets against reinforced floor tiles seeped out into the sanctuary of his chambers.

The smile that ailed her nostalgic lips was the same one that she had worn earlier that day, as Spock emerged. Uhura lauded Gaila with a glimpse perhaps too affable, a tone too attentive. Her thoughts were with the man from that morning, hair matted, chest bare, flesh slick with perishable licks of water.

"That's between us," she disclosed.

"Because that'd be telling," Gaila countered.

* * *

_Kurudi kwangu_: Return to me

_Daima_: Always

_Upendo ana Sauti_: Love has a Voice


End file.
